The Bend City Council convened on October 15, 2025, for a work session from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. focused on council goals including process updates, economic prosperity, website redesign, and a dashboard preview. The regular business meeting began at 6:00 p.m. and included a consent agenda, a quasi-judicial rezoning hearing, approval of property tax exemptions for two affordable housing developments, authorization of Franklin Avenue Shelter funding, adoption of the Emblem Tax Increment Finance Plan, and the city manager’s report.
We're ready. It's a little earlier than we used to now with the schedule, but this will be the last time. All right, so we'll go ahead and call to order the um work session or sort of council goals update part of the meeting tonight. Um and we start with Eric with proposed changes to how we're gonna do this going forward. Right. So a little bit of uh process update. So you mentioned this is the last time that we're gonna combine a quarterly update with a regular business meeting. We have this new schedule where we've differentiated the work sessions from the business meeting. So moving forward, beginning in January, um the council goal updates are just gonna be woven into those uh work session meetings. Um we're gonna talk about talk in more detail about what that means and why we're making that change. We're also gonna today talk to you about economic development. That's it's a goal focus area, so you're gonna hear from Katie Brooks, our new economic development officer, and Cyrus Mooney. Um we're gonna talk about the launch of our new website in January, and we're gonna preview the dashboard that incorporates your metrics that you uh put together as part of the council goals. We have about 90 minutes worth of content uh to get through today. I'm just gonna take about five minutes walking through what's what's changed and then I'll turn it over to Katie. So we'll work the presentation up. Um I'll just keep talking here as Kate's pulling it up. So first off, um the what and the why. So the the what is we want a more hands-on approach to council goal implementation, so that's why we're moving away from just these quarterly updates, which are really about giving a lot of information to council and really be more outcome focused with uh these updates, uh, when woven into those work sessions. And why we're doing it because we want to use your time efficiently. I think you know, we we've learned having these mega long meetings where you have content and receiving all this information and going into a business meeting is a lot to digest. So we're wanting to get in sync with with that. Um to slide four, Kate. So the current state is part of what we have been doing just as a refresh, is to uh we meet internally as a staff every quarter, we meet in our goal areas and we help populate a progress report. You see that progress report every quarter. You can see what's been completed, what's in progress, or if there's something that's been flagged, you can kind of see that general high-level update. We're gonna continue to do that at a quarterly level. So you for the public for accountability on all the action items. Um what's changing is we're not going to have this work session as a standalone. We're again we're gonna incorporate that into those work session updates for those quarterly progress reports. Um, I will be just giving that as part of a city manager report in the future. And we also had an opportunity to involve our advisory boards in those quarterly updates. We're going to continue on that theme. We're going to do another summit of our advisory boards coming up here. We're going to do that once a year just to really get that synced get that synced up. We are already starting to practice that. We're going to be incorporating a variety of advisory boards into our growth plan. We're going to be in we've already planned for that for the electrification policy that you're going to be hearing about next week. So we are doing that mixing of our advisory boards. We're going to be recasting the transportation bond oversight as we've been discussing to be more broad more broad than just the GO bond. So a lot of that work is happening. So what's uh so what's new? I've been kind of talking through this already. Um, what we are doing internally is creating, and we've been doing this for a while, multidisciplinary teams that involve more than just the departments, you know, that you might traditionally think are focused, like police or fire, for example, on the police and fire goals or the public safety goals. We're involving our Office of Performance Management, our data folks, um, city manager's office, legal, really creating for each of these goal areas a team that is focused on the metrics and the data that we're in the North Star that we're trying to achieve, but doing that amongst a cross section of departments and making sure that we're being strategic and not just one-way information but workshopping issues. As I've talked about before, we've been doing this. This isn't all that new. We've been doing this with housing for the last year and a half or so. We've been doing this with our shelters for the last year. So we have some practice.